Biden’s Stutter Highlights BU Center’s Mission to Help Others Struggling with Speech
(10/20/2020, BU Today)
It’s widely accepted that roughly three million Americans stutter, with four times as many men as women. There are myths that stuttering is the result of anxiety or a psychological issue, but Constantino says it is a “neuro-physiological developmental problem” that crops up in childhood as our brains develop the ability to speak. It’s essentially “a wiring problem of the brain, not a psychological problem,” she says.
But that wiring problem can create a heavy emotional burden.
“They don’t always know when it is going to occur or how long it’s going to last,” Constantino says. “So, there’s this natural tendency to have a fight-or-flight reaction to the stress of that. And so they either try to push through it, which makes matters worse, or they develop a whole world around what they can and can’t do, to try to avoid it.”